It’s been pointed out to you before that snark at other commenters is not consistent with acceptance of our comments policy, GregM.

By the way, just a small fact-check, for gratis, it’s “weird”, not “wierd”. You must have been asleep in grade 3 when they taught you that.

Thanks for the link to Christina Ho’s article. Normally I try to stick with primary source articles when I am fact checking. Also my special focus was Greer’s mendacity and I just wanted to leave it there, as being a matter of record. However since you have drawn Christina Ho’s article to my attention I just think I might fact-check it as well. At the very least it should cause some laughs in her faculty commonroom.

That is to the eternal discredit of the perpetrators though it reflects nothing at all about Muslims generally for whom the rapes would have been grave sins and flagrant breaches of Islamic law and morals.

Exactly, yet they were portrayed by the mouthpieces for mouthpieces as Muslim boys with strong anti-Western sentiments who’d failed to assimilate with Australian society and very much supposed to be symptomatic of a particular brand of misogyny imported by the larger Australian Muslim ‘community’ (a word which became heavily loaded)

The K brothers employed every available ‘cultural defence’ and excuse but from my readings these were the ‘desperate’ resorts you find in almost any rape defence. The media would proceed to simultaneously dismiss these arguments (as you did above) and attempt to legitimise them as broader indicators - often from within the same article.

John Howard would respond with:

to integrate into Australian society Muslims need to speak English and ‘treat women equally’.

From the same article:

Popular expressions of outrage at gang rapes in Sydney highlighted not just that they were cases of violence against women, but, because the perpetrators were Muslim, they were almost crimes against Australia. From the beginning, the crimes were overwhelmingly represented as Lebanese or Muslim men raping non-Muslim women, making them a particularly un-Australian crime. As Alan Jones stated in 2001, ‘Lebanese Muslim gangs’ were ’showering their contempt for Australia and our police on these young girls’ (reported on MediaWatch 2002).

Costello would harp about the death of ‘mushy multiculturalism’ in almost every speech he made.

Greer’s characterisation of “the deplorable cases of gang rapes of girls who happened to be Christians by boys who happened to be Muslim” is disingenuous in the extreme.

Why? It’s demonstrably accurate. Hundreds of newspaper articles/tv news and current affairs transcripts/radio talkback transcripts/political speeches and press releases attest to it. On the other hand, thankfully there were many in the media writing concurrently about the political and ‘media massaging’ of events.

I admire your fact checking ability but I’m certainly not convinced I could ever trust your interpretations of facts without some checking of my own (there’s at least one other highly contestable point you made in disagreement with Greer that’s not based on simply ‘getting something wrong’ - and not to avoid that Greer’s factual errors severely weakened her reasoning). Katz demonstrated earlier in this thread, your interpretations are commonly prone to fallibility.

For all the lengths you’ve gone to I still haven’t seen any evidence that led you to believe Greer engaged/engages in ‘malicious filth’.

Australia sent troops to Korea, to Vietnam and to the Gulf. Readiness to be involved in Asia might conceivably be explained as a rational response to the fiction that the wars there were being fought to defend Australia from communist imperialism. Why Australia was so keen to be involved in the Gulf War must remain a mystery.

The Prime Minister at the time, Bob Hawke, explained the reasons for Australia’s involvement in the Gulf War. Greer needs only read his explanation and the mystery will be solved for her. Since her research abilities are so inadequate that she is incapable of looking up his speeches in Hansard I provide the following link to his speech to the House of Representatives on 4 December 1990 setting out the reasons for Australia’s involvement in the war, to assist her, should by chance she come across this critique of her Bali opus.

http://parlinfoweb.aph.gov.au/piweb/view_document.aspx?ID=102354&TABLE=HANSARDR

Australian involvement in that conflict meant very little to its allies, the actual contribution being minuscule because during the 1980s the Australian defence establishment had gradually and deliberately been reduced to next to nothing.
Perhaps the thinking was that if Australia lined up with the US in 1991, it could count on American support if ever it was needed, as it certainly would be in the event of aggression from without. Eagerness to be involved in the Gulf actually marked Australia as a conspicuous member of what was perceived as the pro-Israel axis.

Greer can’t resist having an anti-Israel dig. The Gulf War coalition included Saudi Arabia, Oman, Morocco, Pakistan and Bangladesh, hardly noted for being part of any pro-Israel axis. Also given what Greer calls Australia’s minuscule contribution to the Gulf War it is hard to see how it could have been seen as a conspicuous member of the pro-Israel axis.

In East Timor, Australians came up against another unpleasant fact. America refused to help them with men or materiel in their peacekeeping commitments, and billions of dollars were drained from the public purse. The ultimate effect was probably what America would have desired.

In fact the Americans did provide men and materiel in assistance to the Australian led INTERFET forces. This from World Politics Review, (July 2008):

Under the command of Australian Maj. Gen. Peter Cosgrove, the first units of the newly christened International Force, East Timor (INTERFET) entered the territory on the morning of Sept. 20. The 2,500 soldiers spearheading the operation were overwhelmingly Australian. Besides the several hundred American military personnel eventually engaged in the initial phase of the intervention, the United States also contributed four C-130 Hercules transport planes, additional surveillance aircraft, and two warships.
The commitment of the amphibious ship, U.S.S. Belleau Wood, whose four CH-53 heavy-lift helicopters helped transport supplies to INTERFET, was especially important. Not only did it provide valuable transportation assistance, but it also served as a very visible symbol of the U.S. military commitment to INTERFET and Australia despite the force cap instituted by U.S. defense planners. The U.S. military enjoyed advanced interoperability with the Australia Defense Force in East Timor. Auspiciously, the U.S.S. Mobile Bay had already developed a degree of integration with the Australian military due to its recent participation in the bilateral Crocodile 99 exercises. [link]

One would have thought that anyone who has the slightest pretensions to academic credibility could at least get these facts right. The INTERFET intervention was not a secret operation after all.

Australia increased spending on defence, enough to have an impact on the Australian economy but not enough to make them important players in the international war game. Australia then volunteered men and materiel for the American-led operation in Afghanistan, where it is still involved.

It is strange that Greer bemoans Australia’s increased defence expenditure when earlier she had said that during the 1980s the Australian defence establishment had gradually and deliberately been reduced to next to nothing. However Australia’s increased expenditure on defence has had no significant impact on the Australian economy, which has been booming from 1996 to the present day

Perhaps the bombing of the Sari Club in Bali should not have come as such a surprise. Terrorism is not a substitute for war, but a preparative. The purpose of instilling terror is to force a polarisation of conflict by making neutrality an impossibility, so that armed confrontation becomes inevitable.
By mounting an attack that would be universally seen as vicious, cowardly and unprovoked, the perpetrators have forced a largely nonchalant Australia into the enemy camp. Australian defence spending will certainly increase, with little effect on Australia’s stature as an ally and policy maker but with crushing impact on the Australian people. Already, funding for essential social services has been cut and long-term welfare initiatives are being abandoned.

This is a bizarre statement (though just one of many) by Greer. Australia was already, at the time of the Bali bombing, in the enemy camp as far as the terrorists were concerned. It is hard to think of any country outside of Afghanistan, Iraq and North Korea which had not already, in the wake of the September 11 attacks, aligned themselves with the United States and against the terrorists. Even Cuba lined up with the United States on this one.

The increase in defence expenditure has hardly had a crushing impact on the Australian people. The economy has continued to boom. Taxes have been slashed. The fiscal surplus continues to grow. Overall more money has been spent on social services than ever before

Meanwhile, tension between Muslims and non-Muslims in Australia is mounting, fuelled by media massaging of deplorable cases of gang-rapes of girls who happened to be Christian by boys who happened to be Muslim..

Greer’s characterisation of “the deplorable cases of gang rapes of girls who happened to be Christians by boys who happened to be Muslim” is disingenuous in the extreme. The evidence before the courts demonstrated abundantly that a motivating factor of the Muslim boys in raping the “Christian” girls was very fact that they were not Muslim and therefore fair game for sexual assault. That is to the eternal discredit of the perpetrators though it reflects nothing at all about Muslims generally for whom the rapes would have been grave sins and flagrant breaches of Islamic law and morals.

In allowing the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, to be the first to identify the Bali bombers as al Qaeda, American intelligence has sent an ill-prepared Australia into the front line.

What??? American intelligence allowed Howard to identify the Bali bombers with Al Qaeda??? That is plain weird. It was well known well before the Bali bombing from Singaporean, Indonesian and Australian intelligence services that Jemaah Islamiyah was connected with Al Qaeda and that they were planning bombing operations against western targets in Indonesia. Howard was by no means the first to identify that and it had already been published in Australian newspapers before the Bali bombing.

I was in Indonesia before and at the time of the bombing and the Jakarta Post was reporting on the efforts of Western diplomats, our own included, to get the then president Megawati, to take the JI threat seriously before the bombing occurred.

No, the sheer breadth of my attack doesn’t devolve into pedantry. It exposes her as a systematic academic fraud who fabricates facts from which she then manufactures dishonest arguments. It is not an issue that she makes factual errors. It is that she is a liar. One post on a few errors might show that she is fallible as a researcher. Four posts (and the last one is below) demonstrate that this is her systematic modus operandi. Fabricate an untruth and then use it to construct for the gullible a false argument that can only be justified on the untruth that it is built upon.

You say that she is a polemicist. However as Katz has pointed out:

(But) a justifiable conclusion is never actually justified unless a logical and factually correct argument supports it.

A polemicist will respect an obligation to stay within the bounds of the truth and at least state facts correctly, even if selectively, whatever spin, emphasis and interpretation they put on them to pursue their argument. Greer does not. She just makes things up.

You also describe her as a pamphleteer. Why not cut to the chase and accept that she is a liar and recognise that makes her worthless as a participant in discourse. She offers no special insight as her acolytes wish of her. She offers no insight at all. She is just a cheap act, a sideshow alley character. A controversialist, as Geoff Honnor and Paulus have exposed.

Being not an anthropologist, nor a sociologist nor a historian nor a person holding any qualification in any relevant discipline she has no qualifications to speak with any authority on Aboriginal male rage, any more than she is qualified to speak on proctocology. Not that would stop from straying into that area (and she probably will) if she calculated that it would give her a few days of media sensation. This is her struggle for relevance and it’s sad that there are so many people who delude themselves that they are intelligent who accept her words so uncritically.

On your final smug point with its emphasis on the we when you say “it would be nice if we didn’t take the pamphleteer’s licence with the truth. Surely you’d agree.

You’ve fact-checked my posts then? Care to point out where there is an error of fact in them? If you want to uncritically buy her lies that’s up to you. You can confidently expect however that, in the spirit of free speech, that I will be quite happy to point out the errors in your thinking. You have along way to go in developing the faculty of independent thought.

As promised my last post on Greer’s Bali article will appear next.

Indeed, Kim.
My bet is that his best debates are held firmly in his own personal space.

Bar bores basically, pissed off that no one ever gets their orders right.

I think you have missed one Nabs: “data laden, Strocci structured, low rent Tom Clancy…..”

XYZ
Canberra

Yeah OK, that was a tautology. For “self-obsessed” substitute “humour and empathy-free”.

And to be honest, I shouldn’t have lumped Birdy in with Strocchi and that Greenfield creature. Unlike those two, Graeme’s a true original who has displayed an identifiable sense of humour at times. And is on record as a fan of George Clinton.

Now I lay me down to sleep

While he’s actually pretty smart well read (on occasion) and can sometimes make sense (I agree with some of his geopolitical points), he’s basically commenting for the same reasons that Birdy or that Greenfield creature are, ie: to use whole online communities as surrogates for someone who once dissed them very badly many years ago in a galaxy far far away.

Just think of a combination soapbox/therapist’s couch surrounded by an army of strawmen and you’ll get an idea of what motivates these three horse’s arses of the Blogacalypse. They’re all self-obsessed solipsistic Manichaeans in search of an audience, any audience. Bar bores basically, pissed off that no one ever gets their orders right.

The abandonment of the Japanese offensive may have left the Australian population feeling that its cocoon of arid distance protected it more effectively than any army could have done

But Greer isn’t asserting that if Australians thought that aridity and distance saved them then they were necessarily correct in that assumption. She is saying that this is what Australians thought, whether or not they were correct.

The question is whether or not Australians “may have” thought this.

The interesting thing is that the Battle of the Coral Sea does not appear to have achieved the same status in the minds of Australians as the Kokoda Track. This in turn suggests to me that Australians’ perceptions of the outlines of the Pacific War are seen through a prism of nationalism, or even parochialism, that rejects to some extent the suggestion that Australia was saved by the Americans.

This being the case, it seems to me that there is some validity in Greer’s characterisation of Australians’(perhaps erroneous) views about the main outlines of the Pacific War.

Of course, any policy based on ignorance is fraught with peril. Just ask George W. Bush, or on second thoughts, don’t ask George W. Bush.

Australians thought they could get along with everyone. The Australian passport was welcome everywhere, as American and British passports were not.

The only way to get along with everyone is to take sides with no one, but successive Australian governments have chosen to ignore this obvious fact.

Greer’s argument for neutrality. Let’s have a look at it. Worked well for plucky little Belgium in WW1 didn’t it? And the United States was a neutral at the time the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, wasn’t it?
Norway, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands were all neutrals in World War 2 as well. A lot of good it did them, didn’t it? The Baltic States too. Neutrals all three of them, taking sides with no-one.

Thailand was a neutral at the start of WW2 and friends to everyone as part of their consistent foreign policy. That didn’t stop the Japanese suborning them into becoming an ally and forcing them to accept Japanese troops on their soil.

What history teaches is that what is an obvious fact to Greer is an obvious untruth.

In 1939, prime minister Robert Menzies declared war on Germany before Britain did, probably because he needed to silence considerable opposition to the war on the part of Irish-Australians by bringing in war- time restrictions on freedom of speech and association The assumption was that Britain would defend Australia against any threat of Japanese invasion. In the event, Singapore was sacrificed, and Australia left. defenceless.

In 1939 Robert Menzies did not declare war on Germany before Britain did. His precise words were:

“Fellow Australians,
It is my melancholy duty to inform you officially that in consequence of a persistence by Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her and that, as a result, Australia is also at war….”

There was little if any Irish-Australian opposition to Australia’s involvement in WW2. All the major churches and political parties supported it. Jehovah’s witnesses and “international socialists” –supporters of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact – did not.

These are elementary points in Australian history. It is inconceivable that anyone who makes any claim to have even a passing knowledge of Australian history, let alone any claim to scholarship, could get them wrong.

Meanwhile, Australian pilots were training in Canada and would eventually be involved with other colonials in the Battle of Britain. Their involvement in the Second World War cost the Dominions dear, New Zealand suffering the highest per capita mortality of any Allied country.

Greer leaves aside our gallant Russian allies with some 20 plus million dead, our allies the Chinese with 15 plus million dead and our Polish allies with six million dead.

When wave after wave of Japanese planes attacked Darwin in February, 1942, they met no resistance.

In fact four of them were shot down.

In the event, inertia may have been the best defence. Any foreign power that invaded Australia from the north would pretty soon wish it hadn’t. The limitless expanse offers no support of any kind; there were no forts or railheads for the Japanese to capture, and either too much water or none at all.

The fear was not that Japan would invade from the north, but the north-east along the Queensland coast, where Japanese troops would have found settled communities and agricultural land upon which to subsist, right down that coast. Hence the Battle of the Coral Sea.

The abandonment of the Japanese offensive may have left the Australian population feeling that its cocoon of arid distance protected it more effectively than any army could have done, but Australians should also have been warned that they could not rely on any outside power when push came to shove.

Again a complete and abysmal ignorance of history. The abandonment of the Japanese offensive came with the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Battle of Midway, the Battle of Guadalcanal and the Battle of Papua New Guinea, the first three of which, being American victories, demonstrated to the Australians, at least in respect of the second world war, that when push came to shove they were pretty fortunate to have an outside power to rely upon.

This being so, Australia would seem best advised not to rush to be involved in other people’s quarrels, but what we see is that Australia is still determined to be in at every fight.

This not being so Greer’s argument is quite fallacious.

Next Greer moves on to the Gulf War, East Timor and current affairs. Let’s see from when I next post what arguments she puts forward which so impress LP’s village idiot.

The vast country lies as defenceless as a turtle on its back, because there is not sufficient wealth in the economy to underwrite the cost of developing any kind of infrastructure along the endless coastline. Though the ragged millions to the north might envy whole mountain ranges made of pure iron ore, they have never tried to annex them.

This vast country does not lie defenceless as a turtle on its back. There is no meaningful connection between developing infrastructure along Australia’s endless coastline and the defence of Australia.

The ragged millions to Australia’s north may or may not envy Australia’s whole mountain ranges made of iron ore but at least those in closest proximity, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, are pretty well endowed with natural resources themselves.

The fact that they have not tried to annex those mountain ranges of pure iron ore may well be testimony to them taking the view that Australia is far from being as defenceless as a turtle on its back.

The rest of the world lets Australian uranium mines operate with impunity. The international community did not support the desperate attempts of the Aborigines to prevent the release of radioactive poison from the earth. It did not occur to Australians to think they might be getting away with murder.

The rest of the world buys Australian uranium otherwise we would not be mining it. It is not a matter of letting us do anything with impunity. If the “international community” did not support the “desperate attempts” of some Aborigines then presumably they had their own good reasons for doing not so.

It is typical of Greer that she condescends to Aborigines by implying that the concerns of some are the views of all. Apparently they a just a collective mob to her, without the ability to hold differing views and concerns. If anyone but Greer did that her complacent smug acolytes would be screaming about the racism of it.

It has not occurred to Greer that Australian uranium mining is an entirely lawful activity for the purpose of providing uranium to be used for peaceful purposes such as electricity generation, carried out within the framework of IAEA
guidelines and that it not murder. She will have to get used to it as there will be a hell of a lot more of it in the future.

My next post will be about where Greer, authority on everything, or at least those dumb, silly fools to whom she is a font of all knowledge(yes Kim, I am thinking of you) moves on to geopolitics and World War 2.

Genocide is the attempt to destroy a distinct ethnic group through annihilation of its breeding facility

Oh. Oh really? Oh I didn’t know that. Well I’m glad you explained that. It makes it all okay then. .

This implies a defence of Aboriginal patriarchy, in the context of European settlement and social displacement. (On “Better the devil you know…” grounds.) Which implication is confirmed by use of terms such as “their womenfolk”, a phrase which would be considered anathema by any post-Greer feminist.

It doesn’t necessarilly imply any such thing. The main thesis is that family relations - social relations - patriarchal if you will, yes, have been destroyed by Europeans; and that Aboriginal males are very pissed off.
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It does not automatically follow that Greer is defending patriarchy. The distortion of one’s ideological opponents so what that they actually say is more simplistic and dumber than their real argument is a feature of this relativist po-mo bullshit of which you speak. No truth, no facts just competing discourse. In the context of the ever spiralling downward quality of political debate this does not help.
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As for post-Greer feminism I’d suggest you read Camille Paglia. I suggest you meet Camille Paglia…
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She’ll beat the shit out of you. .
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I myself have thought the military might provide this authority of which you speak. You shouldn’t assume you know all about me. You’ll find my views are quite eclectic.